Human-induced pluripotent stem cells as models for rare cardiovascular diseases: from evidence-based medicine to precision medicine

Rare cardiovascular diseases (RCDs) refer to those cardiovascular diseases that display a low prevalence as well as morbidity. Due to the vast variety of underlying genetic mutations and the relatively low patient population, RCDs present additional challenges for diagnosis. Precision medicine may offer opportunities for designing patient-specific therapies in particular for carriers of variants with undetermined significance. Moreover, precision medicine strategies provide benefit to patients with “common” symptoms but carry in rare genetic variants. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) present a state-of-the-art precision medicine approach which recently made contributions to the study of RCDs via patient-specific iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs). Human iPSC-CMs are derived from a patient’s somatic cells and thus recapitulate a personalized genomics background, serving as patient-specific disease models. In light of these advantages, iPSC-CMs evolved as an effective tool for modeling cardiac disease phenotypes and accurately evaluating the toxicity of potential therapeutic compounds. This review covers approaches for studying RCDs and iPSC-CM models generated so far for different RCDs, such as long QT syndrome (LQT), short QT syndrome (SQT), Brugada syndrome (BrS), arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), and other rare diseases accomplished by cardiac-related syndromes like Fabry disease (FD) and Marfan syndrome (MFS). This overview aims to aid better understanding of the utility of iPSC-CM models, their various features, and future prospects.